PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

[after Stephane Mallarme's poem, "Le Cygne,"

comments from Saiom and Patriciajj caused it

to become a poem]

Dismal and then dark becomes the sky overhead; a

moonless, starless glimpse of that which, in the

water's depth, has surrounded you since the

recession of deluge from the highest mountain's

uppermost peak---in the process of which the

force of its withdraw drew you into the floor of

mud that mired, engulfed, and imprisoned the

stupendous dimensions of your physique, immobilizing

those huge finned limbs and even the slenderly enormous

length of your neck, restricting even the very tip of

your tail, the stabilizer of forward or upward movement.

Leviathanic, behemothian herbivore:

seaweed---or its dedritus drifting from above---nourish you;

last and lowest ripples have exchanged the gasses

across your gills (your lungs, for this long span of ages,

dormant).  Suddenly, as from a hidden core of which you

can know nothing, a groan, even a roar, emerges as the

very world around you is shaken, and the rocks of the

ancient walls that have enclose this place are toppled; of you,

awareness that is not yours has never forgotten you:

plethoras of bubbles arise from numberless fissures, as the

restraints that have so long confined you here shatter and you

begin, effortlessly, begin to rise, out of this trench.  Stiffness, to be

expected after so long, will give way to instincts that have always

been within you.  Some hours after (as another, now dominant,  

species measures the span of the great light above), your

gigantic head breaks the surface, and that great light shimmers

around you.  Not far from here (as another, now dominant,

species measures the span of rocky lands and waterless

surfaces),  one like unto that species (like unto, except in the 

inclination and choice to sin) hangs, suspended, from two

rough-hewn shafts of local wood; by others, of that species

slain . . . .